There are many instances in which the preparation of a document involves input from multiple individuals. In such a circumstance, a working document (that is, still under review and subject to change) is typically circulated by the author thereof to one or more additional persons, by electronic mail. The working document in such a circumstance may, additionally or alternatively, be stored at a central location, such as in a database or data repository, and the document in the database or data repository may be accessed by any of various authorized persons.
Documents often are revised many times before a final document is created. During the course of the revision process, many versions of the document may be generated, sometime in parallel. It is typically desirable to collect and maintain the different versions of the document, for reference or comparison, before (and sometimes even after) the document is finalized. Depending on the complexity of the document and/or the number of people involved in the revision process, there may be a large number of versions of the document to be correlated to each other. Management of multiple versions of a document, and moreover association of a revised version with its previous version is not always straightforward, for example, when multiple persons can access and revise the same working document. That is, a previous version can have multiple successor versions.
Versioning tools and systems have been proposed for maintaining the different versions of a document, as the working document is revised. Each revised version is added to a database or repository, in addition to the original version. The various versions of a document in such a system are typically generated by revising a previous version in electronic form using the same application software (for example, word processor, etc.). In such a homogeneous environment, the author creates the document on a computer, and the document is revised on one or more other computers utilizing similar application software tools. The versioning system may include tools for determining the differences between a revised version and a previous version of the document.
The tools and systems proposed by others for maintaining different versions of a document fail to recognize that there remain many circumstances today in which the editing of the working document is performed by annotation on a hardcopy of the working document, and the annotated hardcopy is scanned to create an edited version of the document. There remains a need for an improved document management tool which allows one to track the multiple versions of a document wherein one or more versions of the document are scanned versions of an edited hardcopy of the document.